Paper Info
Title
Optimal Pricing and Service Provisioning Strategies in Cloud Systems: A Stackelberg Game Approach
Abstract
In this paper we consider several Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, that offer a set of applications using the Cloud facilities provided by an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. We assume that the IaaS provider offers a pay only what you use scheme similar to the Amazon EC2 service, comprising flat, on demand, and spot virtual machine instances. We propose a two stage provisioning scheme. In the first stage, the SaaS providers determine the number of required flat and on demand instances by means of standard optimization techniques. In the second stage the SaaS providers compete, by bidding for the spot instances which are instantiated using the unused IaaS capacity. We assume that the SaaS providers want to maximize a suitable utility function which accounts for both the QoS delivered to their users and the associated cost. The IaaS provider, on the other hand, wants to maximize his revenue by determining the spot prices given the SaaS bids. We model the second stage as a Stackelberg game, and we compute its equilibrium price and allocation strategy by solving a Mathematical Program with Equilibrium Constraints (MPEC) problem. Through numerical evaluation we study the equilibrium solutions as function of the system parameters.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/CLOUD.2013.102
Cloud Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
suitable utility function,service provisioning strategies,spot price,demand instance,stackelberg game approach,saas provider,iaas provider,equilibrium solution,unused iaas capacity,cloud systems,spot instance,optimal pricing,equilibrium price,saas bid,quality of service,resource allocation,cloud computing,mathematical programming,virtual machines,game theory,pricing,cloud
Computer science,Quality of service,Operations research,Software as a service,Provisioning,Resource allocation,Game theory,Stackelberg competition,Bidding,Cloud computing,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2159-6182
978-0-7695-5028-2
21
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.89
20
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Valerio Di Valerio1867.82
Valeria Cardellini21514106.12
Francesco Lo Presti3107378.83